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Forum:People articles

We need to define who is and who is not notable enough to have articles on TG. At the moment we don't have a policy on this and we are in a situation where "non-notables" have articles while some "notables" do not. This seems a bit silly to me. I had a go at defining a few different options for how to define "notable", but felt it a bit clumsy - so I'll just give my opinion. We should have articles for all the major Tolkien scholars (sure there will be "junior" scholars who research Tolkien and teach Tolkien etc., but these will only become more numerous and frankly "run-of-the-mill" - they will need to have made an impact on Tolkien studies I think), Tolkienists who have made major contributions to Tolkien studies or fandom, the main actors and producers of adaptations, the important illustrators/artists, and obviously people connected with Tolkien himself (we will need to draw a line on Tolkien's descendants, though).

For reference have a look at Category:People by name. I think our guiding principle should be, is this useful? Will someone actually search for this person? Will someone want to find out what other things a scholar has written, e.g.?

How we interpret "major" and "important" will naturally be open to conjecture, but in this area we have to make judgements. I know these forum pages go mostly ignored, so please spare a few minutes to share your thoughts. And let's not escalate this into something bigger about the scope of other areas (like publications, games etc.) - one thing at a time please! -- KingAragorn talk contribs edits email 14:11, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree that it would be useful with a policy concerning people articles. But I don't think we need to be as restrictive as you suggest and only include major names, which would likely lead to unnecessary evaluations of who's notable enough. I'd say we better keep it simple and set up a couple of standards (with room for exceptions) which are easy to interpret and follow.--Morgan 15:03, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

My basic worry is that by only including major names, it would be hard to distinguish the Tolkien Gateway people policy from Wikipedia's. What would be the point of having TG if it didn't have a much wider scope than WP when it comes to Tolkien-related concepts and people? --Morgan 21:33, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

[Warning, proponent of Strawberries article is about to reply.] :) Some of our people articles definitely tread close to the notability line, but I can't say I would outright vote to remove any off the top of my head. Morgan brings up a good point (not that I think KingAragorn leans this extreme) in that those subjects not notable enough for a Wikipedia article, are some of the most important for us to keep, they are the ones that contain the information we risk losing through time. They certainly receive less page views, but it's that one scholar delving deep into a specific area of Tolkien study that makes the minor articles worth keeping in my opinion.

I would say the best course of action moving forward is for someone to propose a few subjects which should be deleted and we can come to a conclusion from that discussion. An example I'll give is John Bryning. I think he is probably on the edge of notability, but I would argue the article can be expanded quite a bit, with an image of him, audio clip from the broadcast, etc. There have not been an extreme number of adaptations, so coming to a standard of having an article for actors/actresses associated with each adaptation isn't that far fetched for me at least. I suppose there are quite a few articles about minor artists, but most of those were gracious enough to allow us to display their artwork. At the very least, the minor articles make it easy to stay near the top of those search results. --Hyarion 03:42, 11 October 2013 (UTC)